


Emergency Broadcast

by begformercytwice



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bad Poetry, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 17:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/begformercytwice/pseuds/begformercytwice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When an incident threatens to overwhelm the town, it seems like not even our intrepid radio host can save us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emergency Broadcast

Listeners, we interrupt the scheduled broadcast of the Downtown Night Vale Screech Owl Orchestra's inaugural recital to bring you news of a terrifying, potentially catastrophic incident unfolding in our dear town as we speak. Welcome, perhaps for the final time, to Night Vale.  
Some of you may have seen, as I did, the vague, ominous haze that rose over the horizon in the south this morning, seeming to herald the coming dawn. You may ask yourself, why, Cecil; why were you awake at such an early hour? Surely you need your rest, in order to provide our town with the unbiased and well-researched source of news on which we have all grown to depend? Indeed, dishevelled, yet still perfect, Carlos asked me the same question, but before I had chance to answer him, he followed it with, "and why is the sun rising in the south?".   
Such mysteries as this, as you may imagine, are well beyond the comprehension of non-scientific folk such as you or I. I merely shrugged my shoulders, and continued to eat my breakfast of imaginary peach compote on toasted rye bread, as I, like any right-minded citizen would do in such a situation, observed my beautiful scientist as he, in turn, observed the rising sun, although I did not take nearly as many notes nor make nearly as many calculations as he did. As the sun ascended, his lustrous hair appeared to take on an almost preternatural golden glow, and his eyes, flickering back and forth between the misty sky and the notebook in his hand, seemed not only to bear witness to, but to fully comprehend, the entirety of the cosmos.  
I'm being informed by our newest station intern, Elaine, who is filling in for Dana - or her doppelganger - while she attempts to survive her dog park ordeal, that the incident is still ongoing, and that Night Vale residents need up-to-date information to deal with the situation, rather than the details of my morning routine. Okay, if you say so, Elaine, but I was coming to the point, if you'd have let me. I'm sure our listeners appreciate having a little levity mingled with their more serious news, especially when the news is as serious as it is today.  
According to witnesses sending desperate signals from any high ground they can find, the death toll from the incident is approaching triple figures. What can I say, folks, that you don't already know from your elementary school incident drills: stay out of view of anyone, anyone at all, especially your loved ones; securely fasten all doors, windows and extra- or trans-dimensional portals; and, if you find the incident seeping into your home like a bilious, quasi-sentient industrial accident, simply surrender yourself to its oozing, primordial will, and hope that the next life will bring you just rewards for enduring this painful, horrifying end to your current one.  
My dear listeners, in the past few seconds I have been notified by intern Elaine that the writing is on the wall for Night Vale. She pointed it out to me, mouth agape, as it appeared, glyph by torturously scrawled glyph, scraped into the glass of the two-way mirror that rests on the wall above my microphone, and behind which a variety of malevolent, ageless beings may or may not be resting, absorbing my words, and biding their time until they are ready to respawn. We do not believe the glyphs to originate from these beings, though, as the sheriff's secret police assured us that the creatures were inspected upon their arrival in Night Vale, and had been conclusively proven to possess neither teeth, nor claws, nor any other means of causing any damage to physical property. The only threat the beings pose, the sheriff's deputy told us as he left them in our care, while clawing at his eyes in a state of almost terminal anguish, is purely psychological, so really nothing to worry about, and we wouldn't even notice they were there, lurking in the next room, biding their time, and waiting.   
The message, though; it really raises more questions than it answers. It seems, although it is hard to say for sure, given that more symbols keep appearing as I am talking, to be in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, the complete text of which I will be sure to relay to you as soon as it has manifested in its entirety, and Elaine has completed her on-the-hoof translation of its meaning. Thank goodness for those Tuesday evening classes in necrocryptology at the Night Vale Community College, which, after cooking classes were cancelled owing to an unfortunate mandrake-related lasagna accident, has become our town's most popular adult education course.  
You may think, citizens, that I am not adequately performing my civic duty to report the details of the ongoing incident in our town, and am instead causing the situation to descend further into chaos by whispering frothy falsehoods and misleading minutiae across the pulsating airwaves and into your eager, information-starved ears. I hasten to assure you that this is far from the case, and every piece of intelligence I bring to you is of the utmost relevance, and in no way influenced by the tendrils of the incident that have snaked their way under the door of my studio, and are currently trying to wrap themselves around my throat and force their way up my nose, and then proceed on their inevitable passage down my oesophagus and trachea. In fact, their presence around, upon, and inside my person really is a positive one, as it relieves me from the pressure of independent thought, and allows my body to become the highly efficient feeding ground it was always meant to be.  
It really is a beautiful day out there, people, in spite of what I may have told you earlier, so why not throw open your doors and let the sunshine, and whatever else may be out there, pour in? That southern sun won't be around forever: it looks so delicious, just floating there in the sky, all radioactive and incandescent; someone is bound to devour it, sooner or later. The incident cannot survive off the chemical energy contained within the cells of radio hosts for very long, no matter how his very DNA excites its hunter instincts by squirming and mutating and splitting and reforming itself in attempt to escape the incident's creeping grasp.  
Intern Elaine has informed me that she has completed her translation of the mysterious sonnet that appeared on our studio two-way mirror several minutes or hours or decades or eons ago. The eyes peering at me from beneath her clavicles give away nothing of her inner turmoil over the content of the poem, but I think the way her hands spontaneously decide to loose their grip on her notepad whenever she tries to read aloud from it really speaks for itself. If I can just... I can see the wording from here, I think, and if I twist my neck enough, I can try to read it aloud to you...

"My love, I cannot lose you now, not here,  
Not when, in you, I have found my calling.  
I must, therefore, take this action through fear,  
And hope that you, my pet, heed my warning.  
Cecil, hear me: you I cannot forsake,  
You must not lose yourself to this being.  
If you give in, the town, make no mistake,  
Will find itself consumed, frenzied, fleeing.  
I therefore hid a code within these lines,  
To make the sacrifice your heart could not.  
A victim within your station's confines,  
To finally reduce the beast to naught.  
You will remember none of this, my dear,  
For her short life I must shed every tear."

...I don't know what transpired here over the last few moments, people, but I know it has changed me. Certainly, it has changed intern Elaine, who, having been an almost completely corporeal being when she arrived for work this morning, now resembles nothing so much as a human-shaped mist on the glass above my microphone, a mist that is slowly disappearing, not into the air, as often happens, nor into droplets, which has been known also to occur, but into the mirror itself, as, from behind the mirror, a sound like the emptying of the universe down a drain from which a mischievous toddler-god has pulled the plug, in order to watch our immortal souls circle hypnotically away, is emitting. We apologise for any interference with the transmission it may be causing.  
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming. Sorry for the interruption, folks. Have a good night, Night Vale.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Emergency Broadcast [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166263) by [WhiteHaru37](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhiteHaru37/pseuds/WhiteHaru37)




End file.
